Unloved

This story begins and ends with a photograph taken when I was two years old. Finding it was like discovering that I really did exist after all . It was as if someone was saying ‘No, it wasn’t all in your imagination, that childhood really did happen, and it happened to you.’

Brought up in South London by violent and abusive parents, the Roche children knew only cruelty, neglect, starvation and squ...